the edge of where?

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

Jeremy Corbyn has set out plans that could see high-earners
having to wear cloth caps at work.

Addressing a gathering of his supporters from
the business community today, he told the two falafel-stall holders that
"no one takes a person in a cloth cap seriously".

While wearing a cloth cap, the Leader of the Opposition argued that forcing the super rich to wear cloth caps would "turn them into the figures of
ridicule, the targets of vitriol, that we believe they should be in the
kinder, more decent society we hope to create."

The Labour Leader's remarks come just days
after he was reported to have proposed a cap on maximum earnings.

"We are used to this kind of post-truth misreporting
by the mainstream media," a spokesman explained.

"Jeremy never called for a cap on high
earnings. He called for a cap for
high earners. This is a sensible sartorial suggestion for the 21st
century".

"The idea that Jeremy would propose an
outdated Cuba-style unworkable economic policy – although understandable - is
in this case mistaken."

"However", the aide added,
"given that Jeremy considers money to be the root of all evil, the
suggestion that we might stop people from earning it is not without
merit".

The policy has been criticized by economists
who argue that it could lead to an exodus of talented individuals with very big
hair.

It is also unclear whether footballers would
have to wear the cloth cap under Corbyn's policy. Arsene Wenger, manager at
Corbyn's favourite team Arsenal, has said he would challenge the policy if it
came to it. He added that while he would personally never agree to wear the
cloth cap, he might compromise on a beret.

Saturday, 7 May 2016

When I was a student I often wrote notes on facebook. I guess I had more time.

It was like my blog before I had this blog.

Well, one of the notes I wrote was all about... Jeremy Corbyn!

It was 2009, and Jeremy was an irrelevant backbencher who garnered little interest. Seriously: my note only got a single like, and that was from me.

I thought I'd deleted all those old notes and lost to the ether anything I hadn't transferred to this blog.

Turns out I was wrong. Searching my computer I found a word document that had them all - so here's the note about Jeremy. But first, I'd like to point out that I was totally ahead of the zeitgeist here, writing about Jeremy long before it became fashionable.

This evening Jeremy Corbyn, MP
for Islington North, came to speak to the Oxford University Labour Club about
the recent conflict in Gaza. It was a pretty decent talk, for the most part.
But at the end I couldn't resist going up to him and asking a cheeky question.

Me to Jeremy Corbyn:
“Thank you for your talk, I really enjoyed it. I just wanted to ask: how come
Zionists have such a stranglehold on Labour politics? I mean, take James
Purnell for example – he went from being in LFI to a ministerial position. How
do they have such control?”

Jeremy Corbyn:
“I only wish I knew... money, I suppose.”

lol.

Corbyn won the 2001 Beard of the Year award, after having
described his beard as "a form of dissent" against New Labour.

Monday, 25 April 2016

Trade - Brexiteers
believe we could negotiate a deal with the EU under which we could continue to
trade as usual, but without having to make payments to the EU, being subject to
its regulations, or allow free movement of people. This from the Economist
explains why such a belief is fanciful:

"At a
minimum, the EU would allow full access to its single market only in return for
adherence to rules that Eurosceptics are keen to jettison. If Norway and
Switzerland (whose arrangements with the EU many Brexiters idolise) are a
guide, the union would also demand the free movement of people and a big
payment to its budget before allowing unfettered access to the market.

Worse, the EU
would have a strong incentive to impose a harsh settlement to discourage other
countries from leaving. The Brexit camp’s claim that Europe needs Britain more
than the other way round is fanciful: the EU takes almost half Britain’s
exports, whereas Britain takes less than 10% of the EU’s; and the British trade
deficit is mostly with the Germans and Spanish, not with the other 25 countries
that would have to agree on a new trade deal."

The City -
The big banks, insurers and other big City players have been pretty consistent
in their view that Brexit would harm the City. It's possible they're wrong, but
the consistency with which they've expressed their view should at least give
you pause for thought.

Politics
- Finally, of course I accept that being part of the EU entails some loss
of sovereignty, but for the reasons above and others, I think it's a price
worth paying. And at least if we're in the EU we can influence the EU; outside,
we risk incurring many of the costs without the benefits - as a Norwegian
minister once put it, “if you want to run Europe, you must be in Europe. If you
want to be run by Europe, feel free
to join Norway.”

Monday, 20 July 2015

For the overwhelming majority of people
this blog post is completely superfluous. They read the newspapers, consider the last
election result or think about the 1980s and the fact that Corbyn won’t win an
election is obvious. But for the small group that continue to clamour for
Corbyn – I hope to change your mind. Here’s why the arguments in his favour
don’t stack up.

Pro-Corbyn
argument number 1At the last election voters weren’t
offered a real choice. It was austerity heavy or austerity light. The one place
voters were given a real choice – Scotland – they overwhelmingly voted for an
anti-austerity party. If Labour was a genuinely anti-austerity party, like
Corbyn would create, people would have voted for it.

In the rest of the country voters were offered an anti-austerity choice – the Green Party. They
didn’t vote for it;

One might argue that people
didn’t vote Green because, due to our FPTP voting system, the Greens were not a
viable choice in most constituencies. But if voters nationally were against
austerity, then even if most people's choice was just austerity-light (Labour) or austerity-heavy (Tory), you would expect austerity-light to win – it didn’t;

The SNP's success
cannot in any case be put down entirely to its economic offering. Nationalism
and weaknesses within the Scottish Labour party machine contributed to it;

Scotland has for a long time been to the left of most of
the country. A policy offering that works in Scotland won’t necessarily work in
the rest of the country;

It’s worth remembering that even if Labour had won every single seat
in Scotland, the Tories would still have a majority nationally. If the next government is to be a progressive one, that majority has to be overturned. If
Labour shifts leftwards, it may well pick up seats from the SNP, but there is no
evidence to suggest it will take away Tory seats. (And in any case, Scottish seats make up less than 10% of the whole).

Pro-Corbyn
argument number 2

Disillusion
with a Westminster elite who are all too similar has fuelled the rise of UKIP.
UKIP votes were a protest vote for people who wanted something different.
Corbyn is different. He will win back the their votes.

A protest vote for something different need not have been a vote for UKIP –
it could have been a vote for the Green party, an independent candidate, or a
spoilt ballot. So a vote for UKIP also suggests something about the politics of the
people making their protest vote – a politics that is anti-immigration and
anti-EU. Corbyn is probably the most pro-immigration of the Labour leadership
candidates. There is little reason to believe his politics would appeal to UKIP
voters;

Corbyn has angered and alienated UKIP voters with a recent interview
in which he maligned many of them as racists (probably true, but nevertheless not a great way to get them on side…)

In any case, Corbyn is not the only candidate who differs from
the typical Westminster elite in some regard. Corbyn is an old, white, male
southerner. The same can’t be said for any of the other candidates.

Pro-Corbyn
argument number 3

Corbyn
is brave. He has the confidence to speak to terrorists to promote peace. He has
been unfairly attacked in the press for calling them friends, but that’s just
how he speaks to people. If peace is to come we need leaders like him, who will
do dialogue with terrorists.

Corbyn is not the only
candidate willing to talk to terrorists in pursuit of peace. At leadership
hustings this week Cooper said she would do it. The difference between them is
one of language and approach; she would not call them friends.

In Corbyn’s interview with Ch4 he explained that he used the word
‘friend’ as a ‘collective term’. The explanation is bizarre – there are
multiple ‘collective terms’ that could be used to describe Hamas politicians,
such as ‘leaders’, ‘representatives’, or just ‘politicians’.Why use ‘friends’? Corbyn has since said that
he just calls everyone ‘friend’, but…

Politicians have to use language in a nuanced way. The word
‘friends’ connotes warmth and support. You don’t need to be someone’s friend to
make peace with them. Calling someone a friend, whether one intends it or not,
quite obviously conveys support – which ought not to be given to homophobic,
anti-semitic terrorists.

Pro-Corbyn
argument number 4

What
about all those people who didn’t vote? They didn’t vote because all the main
parties are too similar. Corbyn is different. They’ll vote for him.

Where’s the evidence that non-voters are overwhelmingly leftists?
What’s to say that Corbyn's inclusion on the ballot paper won’t rouse non-voters
from their political slumber to vote Tory, to make sure he doesn’t win? The
truth is, we just don’t know.

The reality is that people who don’t vote, don’t vote for a whole
bunch of reasons. Some are left wing, some are right wing. Many just
don’t care.

In any case, it's not a sound election strategy to pin your hopes on
the one group of people whose track record suggests that they don’t care enough
about politics to vote.

Finally, nothing promotes voter apathy as much as an alternative that is not perceived to be credible, and based on all the polling and anecdotal evidence around, a Corbyn-led Labour party would not be perceived as being credible.

Monday, 26 January 2015

The Campaign Against Anti-semitism is a fairly new grassroots organisation combating antisemitism. Previously it organised rallies such as this one. However, as I explained last week, it's recent survey, which has made all sorts of headlines, was

The CAA website claims
that in July 2014, 95% of hate crimes in London were against Jews. This is false. The
figure is only true if limited to faith
hate crimes in July, and even then there is no breakdown of the number. And if
we look at 2014 as a whole, there were 13,000 hate crimes, of which only 358
antisemitic. That’s not 95% - it’s not even 5%.

Thursday, 22 January 2015

It's a letter from the Israeli ambassador to Nick Clegg, voicing concerns about David Ward MP. For Atzmon, such a letter prompts the question 'Is Britain still a sovereign country? - as he's written at the bottom of the page.

Quite a logical leap that. Not really sure how he gets from an ambassador's letter to Britain lacking sovereignty, unless - like classical anti-semites - it's because he chooses to see sinister Jewish control wherever he looks. (Although he'd probably protest that he was merely being anti-Israel...).

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Jewish life in Britain is vibrant,
flourishing, and unashamedly public. We have our own book festival and food
festival, our own newspapers and magazines. More children go to Jewish schools
than ever before. Jewish youth movements take hundreds of children on summer
camps each year. At Christmas each year, hundreds of Jews go to a conference,
Limmud, to discuss and celebrate Jewish life. As the Jewish Policy Research
(JPR) concluded after conducting a survey on anti-Semitism:

“…compared with
other Jewish populations in Europe, Jews in the United Kingdom generally
experience less anti-Semitism and are less worried about it. There is evidence
to indicate that most British Jews feel fully integrated into British society,
and that discrimination against Jews is largely a thing of the past”

The JPRs findings were published in July.
Yet now a survey by the Campaign for Anti-Semitism (CAA) – a grassroots
organisation of activists – claims that over half of British Jews see no future
in the UK. And this finding has been making headlines.

It seems too bad to be true – and that’s probably
because it isn’t true.

How can it be that the CAA’s findings
deviate so drastically from the findings of the JPR report? The JPR survey of
anti-Semitism was conducted by experts in their field and subjected to careful
statistical testing, all of which is detailed in their report. In contrast, the
CAA survey of anti-Semitism was not, and it shows.

In fact the CAA’s survey had two parts. The
first, in conjunction with Yougov, examined non-Jewish attitudes towards Jews
in Britain. That part wasn’t too bad, although I’d take issue with a couple of
things. For example, according to that survey, not wanting a family member to
marry a Jew is anti-Semitic. But that logic would surely cast as racist any Jew who
opposes a family member marrying out – something I suspect many British Jews
feel.

The second CAA survey, of UK Jews
perceptions of anti-Semitism, was deeply flawed. Firstly, it fell foul of
selection bias, where the method of selecting respondents biases the ultimate
findings. I completed the survey after finding it on the CAA's facebook page – and I
suspect many other people will have found it in similar ways. People who are
looking on websites about anti-Semitism are clearly going to be more likely to
consider anti-Semitism to be a big issue, thereby distorting the results.

Secondly, the survey asked questions that
were laden with assumptions and extremely leading. For example, ‘Media bias
against Israel fuels persecution of Jews in Britain’ – a question that presupposes
the existence of anti-Israel bias.

Finally, the report shows no record of
which respondents said what. Is there a difference in the responses of
respondents depending on how they learnt of the report? Without more data about
the backgrounds of the respondents, it’s very difficult to properly analyse the
results.

Most problematic, in my view, is the odious
suggestion that the current experience of anti-Semitism in Britain ‘has echoes
of the 1930s’. According to CAA, that’s what over half of UK Jews think.
Really? Is our community really that lacking in perspective? 1930s anti-Semitism was state sponsored and quotidian. Modern anti-Semitism
is challenged by the state and – as evidenced by the JPR’s data on how
frequently people actually experience anti-Semitism – is thankfully rare.

The authors of the CAA survey report purport to convey a community living in fear. But through the hyperbolic headlines they have prompted they are guilty of contributing towards the very climate of fear about which they claim to be so concerned.